Zachariah Rutledge

Position Title

Ph.D. Student

Unit

Agricultural and Resource Economics

Zachariah Rutledge is a Ph.D. candidate in the Agricultural and Resource Economics department at the University of California, Davis. His research incorporates elements of labor, immigration, agricultural, and development economics. He is currently studying how reduced employee availability in the agricultural sector affects farming decisions and labor-intensive agricultural production in the state of California. He holds a Bachelor's degree in economics and a Master's degree in Agricultural and Resource Economics (both from U.C. Davis). If you would like to learn more about him or his research, please refer to his personal website at https://www.zachrutledge.com.

“As a Ph.D. student I had already worked on some immigration issues in my studies, and when this topic surfaced I began looking deeper into the issue and realized that we lacked a lot of good information to properly examine and fully explore the issue,” Rutledge told Western Farm Press in a telephone interview. “I contacted the California Farm Bureau which had conducted a survey in 2017. I felt like we needed to add additional questions to the survey to get a broader picture of the issue, and the CFB agreed to partner with us to conduct the 2019 updated survey.”

"Although there is evidence that some of the farmers are switching acreages, in my opinion, it doesn't seem to be happening at an alarming rate," Zachariah Rutledge, a UC Davis researcher and one of the paper's co-authors said. "But the trend is going upward."

"The farm labor supply is declining, and farmers are responding by changing their production practices,” said the study’s co-author, Zachariah Rutledge, a doctoral student in the UC Davis Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics. “These results are important because they show how big of a problem this is for California farmers, and they suggest that the problem is not going to go away in the near future.”

"Part of this issue is driven by labor supply factors. The farm labor force in the U.S. is aging, and it's not really being replaced by young immigrant workers the way it once was, " Zachariah Judson Rutledge, a U.S. Davis doctoral student and the lead author on the study, told Newsweek. "One of the main factors was there's an expanding economy in Mexico for both farm work and non-farm."

This paper by Zach Rutledge provides empirical estimates of the short-run impacts of immigration on the employment opportunities of US-born workers based on a novel sectoral approach. It will focus on six economic sectors with low skill requirements and high shares of immigrant workers based on panel data at the metropolitan area-year level of aggregation.